Passphrase dictionary attack countermeasures in tklbam's keying mechanism

Background: how a backup key works

In TKLBAM the backup key is a secret encrypted with a passphrase which is uploaded to the Hub.  Decrypting the backup key yields the secret which is passed on to duplicity (and eventually to GnuPG) to be used as the symmetric key with which backup volumes are encrypted on backup and decrypted on restore.

TKLBAM: a new kind of smart backup/restore system that just works

Drum roll please...

Today, I'm proud to officially unveil TKLBAM (AKA TurnKey Linux Backup and Migration): the easiest, most powerful system-level backup anyone has ever seen. Skeptical? I would be too. But if you read all the way through you'll see I'm not exaggerating and I have the screencast to prove it. Aha!

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Backups are hard, making sure you got it right - harder

According to Murphy's Law, everything that can go wrong, eventually will go wrong.

This is true for backups on multiple levels. A backup is often our last line of defense when things go wrong, but so many things can go wrong with the backup itself that we usually don't find out about it until, well, horror of horrors, the backup fails.

On the surface, backups can fail for zillions of reasons.

Finding the closest data center using GeoIP and indexing

We are about to release the TurnKey Linux Backup and Migration (TKLBAM) mechanism, which boasts to be the simplest way, ever, to backup a TurnKey appliance across all deployments (VM, bare-metal, Amazon EC2, etc.), as well as provide the ability to restore a backup anywhere, essentially appliance migration or upgrade.

Note: We'll be posting more details really soon - In this post I just want to share an interesting issue we solved recently.

Ask us anything

We're going to be doing a series of interviews with prominent TurnKey community members so we figured it would make sense to do an interview with the founders of TurnKey (that's us!).

Interviewing ourselves is a bit weird, so instead we're inviting the TurnKey community to propose the questions which we'll answer in a separate blog post.

So... ask us anything!

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Django settings.py for development and production

So you developed a Django web application and now need to deploy it into production, but still need to actively continue development (bugfixes, tweaks, adding and testing new features, etc.)

In your development environment you probably had debugging enabled, performance settings disabled, used SQLite as your database, and other settings that make development easier and faster. 

But in production you need to disable debugging, enable performance, and use a real database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, etc.

GNU high school: teaching kids by contributing to open source

Today I'd like to spotlight TurnKey's unlikely relationship with Chelsea School, a high school in suburban Maryland. I'm going to try to tell this story on two levels:

  1. The straightforward who-what-why.
  2. Why you should care.

I'll start with the latter. If it works maybe you'll stick around for the full story.

Kids collaborate with NASA, discover cave on Mars

Recently, a 7th grade science class, using the raw data from a NASA satellite, made a remarkable discovery: a mysterious cave on Mars.

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Tip: use custom search engines for efficiency

I don't need to tell you how search improves our efficiency on the web, but using custom search engines can make your day even more efficient.
 
Configuring your browser to use custom search engines is a massive time gain, and improves your work flow.

TurnKey Appliance Development Contest: An Open Source Summer Bonanza!

Over the last few months donations have been trickling in and gradually piling up. Since there's a limit to how much beer we can reasonably drink we've been brainstorming ideas for using that money to help the project.

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Django navigation bar (active link highlighting)

Every web application needs a navigation bar. Common practice is to indicate to the user where he or she is, and is usually implemented by using a visual aid such as a bold type-face, different color or an icon.
 
I wanted an elegant, generic, extendable solution to "highlight" a link on the navigation bar without hardcoding URLs, using ifequals, or using template block inheritance by specifying a navbar block on each and every template (you'd be surprised, but the above mentioned are recommend often).

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